Wine Tasting Experiences
ThirtyFifty is an award-winning wine tasting company offering wine tasting events and wine appreciation courses in the UK. Our wine tastings are led by ThirtyFifty's team of wine experts, all are WSET-qualified, experienced presenters.
Wine Tasting Evenings & Days
We have a range of evening and one-day wine tasting experiences available in the UK. Our Wine Tasting Evenings are available in London, Cardiff, Liverpool, and Birmingham and our One Day Wine Courses are held in London.
Prices are £49 per person for the Introduction to Wine Tasting and Chris Scott's Online Wine Tasting, and, in London, our Champagne & Sparkling Wine evenings. ThirtyFifty's Discovery Day Course and Champagne & Sparkling Tasting Day, including a delicious 3 course lunch, are £129 per person.
You'll meet like-minded wine drinkers and learn in a small group of around 12 people so can attend either by yourself or invite a friend along.
Wine Tasting Gift Vouchers
ThirtyFifty Gift Vouchers make a great Christmas or birthday present for wine lovers. Redeemable against our online wine tastings, they are open-dated and valid for 24 months.
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WINE TASTING GIFT VOUCHER - £49 | |
| ThirtyFifty Online Wine Tasting Evening - Open Dated. Valid for 24 months for an Online Wine Tasting via Zoom | ||
| COST £49 | Buy | |
Review for Jancis Robinson by Tamlyn Currin
Club 30-50
Tamlyn Currin started doing wine classes with Michael Schmidt about five years ago, and then went down the more conventional route by doing the WSET Intermediate and Advanced in 2006. She plans to be writing her final WSET Diploma exams in June 2009. She recently tried out a less formal approach.
If enthusiasm and vitality are infectious, Chris Scott (pictured) should be quarantined. I was not entirely sure whether to expect much from an Introduction to Wine and Wine Tasting class in London last month. I left invigorated, and it wasn’t simply owing to the fact that Chris does not feel that spitting is necessary in his particular sessions.
The session is packed with humour, but Chris imparts real gems of information under a magnificently covert guise of irreverence. He has strong, and occasionally controversial, opinions (on terroir, for example) but all is made infinitely palatable when balanced with his incisive, wide-reaching knowledge and lack of pretension. He is also deceptively disciplined about managing time, and answering questions without getting too distracted from the task in hand.
ThirtyFifty was started in 2002 by Chris and his wife Jane.The name has nothing to do with age but refers to the conventional wine-growing latitudes on either side of the equator – a theme which cropped up several times during the tasting as it became clear that climate is one of Mr Scott’s key preoccupations. They operate from an internet base and hold private tastings, run an online wine shop and do a series of podcasts.
A session such as the one I attended is limited to 15 people, which works.The format is simple: two tasting glasses, a sheet listing the wines (seven in total), an unused spittoon and a nifty crib sheet of key characteristics for major grape varieties and other useful bits of information. For this session (the first of three), there were four whites and three reds, with one of each served blind. We tasted wine from England, France, Italy, South Africa, Chile and Australia. Chris gets people to score wine on a 5-point scale, based purely on personal enjoyment: 1 = not to my taste, 4 = a pleasure to drink, 5 = outstanding. This gives him an idea of what sort of wine people like, and the universally panned wines do not get picked for tastings again.
If this class was anything to go by, ThirtyFifty has a good formula – it’s a fun, unpretentious social event that is actually very rich in useful, interesting information. Chris covers a broad range of topics but keeps the focus on key aspects such as the structure of the wine, regional influences and climate. He encourages discussion and questions, and selects some good wines. I’d go again.
